eric boehs

How many menu bar icons do you really need?

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:27:00 -0600

I’m down to four, kinda.

Let me start by saying you should work to eliminate anything that doesn’t provide value to you. This being said, let’s look at all the applications I had that take up menu bar space (and my attention as well). Note: You can remove any apple icon (or third-party app that properly uses the menu bar framework) by Cmd-Dragging it off.

Apple’s Defaults:

Spotlight: Thanks to LaunchBar I never use spot light (even for searching with spotlight as LaunchBar has built in spotlight search). In Snow Leopard, you can hide the menu bar icon (without breaking Spotlight) by renaming your Search.bundle.
Date/Time: I have a hard time justifying ALWAYS having the date and time available to view. I don’t see it as necessarily being relevant to have viewable at every moment. If I need to check the time it’s only one button press away (F4 for Dashboard). That being said, it’s one of the 4 items in my menu bar. But it’s not the default Date/Time menu item. This is a custom formatted iStat Menu date/time menu item. It gives me the date, day of week, and time of day without the AM/PM indicate (useless space used… I know if it’s AM or PM). It also gives me a nice drop down calendar when clicking on it. If you haven’t checked out iStat Menus, you should do so now.
Volume: I have 3 buttons on my keyboard for this, why do I need another one that’s accessible with the pesky mouse? The only argument for keeping it is the alt-click functionality that Snow Leopard has brought us. It allows you to quickly change your input and output devices. But with the help of LaunchBar, the Sound preference pane is about a second away, so I leave the sound icon off of my menu bar.
Airport: Here’s the first easy one, I’m not a heavy traveler so I’m not constantly connecting to different APs. I have about two, I connect to often and these connect automatically. Since I rarely connect to a new AP, going to the Network Preference Pane every once in a while isn’t an issue.
Bluetooth: Another easy one, how often are you using this menu to interface with a device? We know you don’t have tethering, and even if you do, you know you use USB tethering over bluetooth as your (phone’s) battery is dead in 2 hours flat.
Battery: I use SlimBatteryMonitor to only show my battery when I’m using it. If it’s plugged in or charging, I don’t care of it’s status. I really don’t care about my battery until it goes below 20% or 30% but I couldn’t find an option to hide it until it hits a percentage.

Some other Apple icons:

Time Machine/iSync: This is only useful for initiating a backup/sync which I never do. I don’t need to know the next time it’s backing up/syncing, or that it’s currently backing up/syncing. That’s the point of automatic backups/sync, you don’t have to worry about it.
iChat: Really? There’s no point to this one.
User Accounts: This one is only needed for faster user switching. If you have to have this feature, change it to the icon (instead of the full user name) or see if there’s a way to remove it completely via some fancy command line hackery.
Input Menu: Pointless
Spaces: There are keyboard shortcuts to view your spaces and switch between them. This icon makes you use the slow and inefficient mouse. Remove it promptly (the menu icon, and possibly the mouse :)).
Displays: Another useless icon.

Third-party Applications:

Dropbox/Wakoopa: This is a tough one. The icon is useful to see when it’s syncing. But I don’t care to stare at it when nothing’s happening. Thankful Erik Phansen has a nice tutorial on how to make the inactive Dropbox icon transparent. I use one of the transparent icons for Wakoopa’s Tracker as well. The icon you need to replace is called icon_mac_menubar and is also in the Resources directory.
Google Notifier/Mail Unread Menu: Since Google Notifier doesn’t have push support, I have moved to Mail.app. It was very easy to setup (just type in your email/password in the Add accounts wizard) and it does support push. BTW, check out Google’s recommended IMAP client settings article. I do have my dock hidden, so I don’t always see if I have new mail. To over come this, I make notifications “Sticky” in my Growl settings for Mail.app. I never miss an email because they are STUCK to my screen, until I hit the x (or click to reply). You’ll need the GrowlMail plugin for this one.
Tweetie: This one’s a lot like Mail. I hid the icon (in Advanced Preferences) and sticky the replies/DMs.
Adium/Skype: Pointless.
iStat Menus: This is another tough one. There’s a lot of functionality that you can get from this app. But I don’t really need to know the temp and fan speeds of my machine. CPU is nice as I can quickly see why my machine has slowed to a crawl, but there is also a dashboard widget (made by the same company) that does the same thing. The only problem I have with that is if my computer is slowed to a crawl, I’m going to have a hard time opening dashboard. RAM is also nice because it’s another gauge to why my computer may be running slow. And Network throughput is a quick glance at my up/down speeds. I like to have this on all machines so I can glance at each screen to see which one is causing my network to fail. These are all very subjective and could probably be removed, leaving with you the time, or nothing at all (GO YOU!).
FastScripts: This one is a neat little secret in FastScripts, unfortunately you have to run it every time you boot. I’m sure you could make it run at start up. I copied the Apple Script from this form post and bound it to a hot key in FastScripts. If you are geeky enough to use FastScripts, this is all the instruction you need.
Bowtie: There’s an option to hide the menu bar icon. Do it!
Crash Plan: See TimeMachine and Bowtie.
ExpanDrive: There’s an option to hide ExpanDrive. I always have it running and if the drives aren’t accessible, then I know it’s not running. If I want to add a new one, I just launch the application (using LaunchBar of course) and add one.
Jumpcut: I no longer use it as LaunchBar has similar functionality built in and it works great!
Growl: Why would you have an icon for this?
NetworkLocation: There’s an option to hide it.

Now after writing all of this, I’d like to note that there is a use for those 22 pixels at the top of your screen. And applications don’t use all of the screen real estate there. So if you can find useful, non-distracting uses for this space then this is your time to shine! I find my use of iStat Menus is a useful (but some what distracting) use of this space. The way iStat Menus presents this information is quiet nicer than what you get from the command line.

Boot Mac OS X Client in VMWare Fusion from a Physical Disk

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:02:13 -0500

Yup you heard right. Boot an OS X Client installation boot camp style.

Open up Terminal and create a ServerVersion.plist on the hard drive you want to boot from (Replace Macintosh HD with your volume’s name):
- touch “/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist”
Open Disk Utility and unmount the disk you want to boot from.
While you’re there, get the disk id by right clicking the disk and choosing Information. It should be disk0 or disk1 or something like that.
Back to Terminal, find out which partition you want to boot from using VMWare’s rawdiskCreator utility (replacing disk0 with your disk id):
- cd “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion”
- ./vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk0
Next run this command, replacing your disk id and the “1” with the partition listed in the print command (You can also replace rdm with a name of your choice):
- ./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 1 ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/rdm ide
For some reason rawdiskCreator mounts the disk you just created a vmdk of, so unmount the disk again.
Now create a new VM in VMWare Fusion using ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/rdm.vmdk as your existing virtual disk.
Select Convert if VMWare says that the virtual disk was created with an older version of VMWare.
Make sure that Mac OS X Server 10.5 (or 10.6) 32-bit is selected. 64-bit may work too, I haven’t tested it.
Save the VM and Boot it.
Enjoy.

Click to Flash - An alternative to Safari Adblock on Snow Leopard

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:20:56 -0500

Click to Flash - An alternative to Safari Adblock on Snow Leopard:

Right now Safari Adblock requires you to run Safari in 32 bit mode if you’re using snow leopard. A good alternative is to use Click to Flash which will block all flash content by default. You’ll still see a lot of ads, but at least they won’t be slowing your browser down. It also allows you to view HD h.264 videos on YouTube without ever loading the flash player.

Just restored my 3GS and re-jb'd it

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:41:17 -0500

Did I forgot anything?

apt-get install sbsettings sbsettingsinsomnia sbsettingsipod adv-cmds lsof sudo top git sqlite3 subversion bitesms com.phoenix.pandoracontrols playtrack org.chris-w.scrobble com.xwaves.xgps inetutils netcat network-cmds nmap rsync wget whois rubygems ruby backgrounder com.zataang.spotbright screen mobileterminal vim net.howett.cydelete metasploit3 php

Sync your iPhone or iTouch from the Command Line

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:29:00 -0500

You could just run this command:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/reenumerate $(system_profiler | grep -A3 iPhone | grep Vendor | awk ‘{ print $3 }’),$(system_profiler | grep -A3 iPhone | grep Product | awk ‘{ print $3 }’)

But I suggest you first get your iPhone’s Vendor ID and Product ID and then set up an alias.

Get your vendor id: system_profiler | grep -A3 iPhone | grep Vendor | awk ‘{ print $3 }’
Get your product id: system_profiler | grep -A3 iPhone | grep Product | awk ‘{ print $3 }’
Now do a test sync:
- cd /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources
- ./reenumerate 0x05ac,0x1234
- Your iPhone should now be syncing
Now add an alias to this command to your ~/.bash_profile (replace 0x1234 w/ your Product ID):
echo “alias synciphone=’/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/reenumerate 0x05ac,0x1234’” » ~/.bash_profile
And finally restart your bash session or run: source ~/.bash_profile

Now you can run synciphone from any command line on your machine and your iPhone will sync. Yay!

Note: This is definitely a hack as it just drops the phones usb connection and let’s it reconnect (This includes your usb tethered internet connection). It doesn’t harm your device in any way, but iTunes will not sync if “automatically sync when device is connected” is unchecked. I’ll look for a better solution and post it if I can find one.

iPhone 3 Bluetooth Services

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:39:31 -0500

Here’s what each is (I believe):

AVRCP - for play/pause/next/prv on bt headphones |

Audio Source - A2DP Renamed |

Handsfree Gateway - Use your computer’s mic to talk on the phone |

IrMC Sync - Some sort of simple syncing service… possibly a full on wireless sync |

PAN Network Access Profile - For Internet Tethering

Phonebook - For access to the contacts for bluetooth devices (for dialing via smart bluetooth headsets)

PnP Information - Not sure maybe something for making a peer-to-peer connection for gaming

Service Discovery - Standard Bluetooth service used to discover other services

Wireless iAP - Another profile for wireless tethering

Again, there’s no HID service being reported. Also, I’m not an expert on this, and this is just a best guess.

Here’s a screenshot of the services I’m talking about: http://ericboehs.com/screenshots/20090619-182608.png

Thoughts on Liars

Tue, 12 May 2009 10:49:51 -0500

When you don’t look up to someone, it’s easy to tell when they are lying.

The reverse is true when you look up to someone; it’s harder to tell when they’re lying.

Thoughts on Legs

Thu, 07 May 2009 22:05:15 -0500

If you ask someone to do something, and your legs are in the open, chances are you won’t get what you want.

But if your legs are covered, your legs look unavailable, so you are more likely to get that person to do what you ask.

I think this tricks the mind into thinking your are helpless because you have no legs.

"YO DAWG I HERD YO AND YO DAWG LIKE YO YOS SO WE PUT YO DAWG IN A YO YO SO YO CAN YO YO YO DAWG WHILE..."

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:13:30 -0500

“YO DAWG I HERD YO AND YO DAWG LIKE YO YOS SO WE PUT YO DAWG IN A YO YO SO YO CAN YO YO YO DAWG WHILE YO DAWG YO YOS, DAWG”

- http://ericboehs.com/screenshots/20090417-200949.png

Did You Know

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:29:36 -0500

Did You Know

Changing my website title...

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:24 -0500

I’m changing my website title to have my name in it. Here’s what google looks like pre-change: http://tr.im/hOJT Let’s c how fast google is.

Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy Pretty funny -...

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:14:05 -0500

Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy

Pretty funny - but checked out his other comedy sketches and they aren’t clean, although this one is.

Text Transformations using Text Mate

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:05:00 -0500

Text Transformations using Text Mate:

This is a sleep walking dog. This is the funniest 23 seconds...

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:00:00 -0500

This is a sleep walking dog. This is the funniest 23 seconds you will experience today.